Inspired by the National Building Museum's exhibition "Architecture of an Asylum: St. Elizabeths 1852–2017," AFI Silver presents two landmark films that depict mental health hospitals not as therapeutic sites designed to heal, but as bleak traps meant to symbolize American society at large. Each film is a masterwork of visual and narrative style, but both deploy similar stereotypes about psychiatric hospitals and the mentally ill — institutions are forbidding and cold, patients are violent, pathetic or funny, and staff is either abusive or indifferent. Produced during a period of widespread hospital shutdowns and reorganization, the films' simplistic characterizations did little to confront the stigma of mental health treatment, despite otherwise succeeding as fierce indictments of social control and dysfunction. "Architecture of an Asylum" is on view at the National Building Museum through January 15, 2018. More information at nbm.org.
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ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST

Special Features:Intro by the National Building Museum's Sarah Leavitt on Oct. 9

A criminal pleads insanity to escape prison only to find himself struggling against the oppression of hospital staff. Kirk Douglas had acquired the rights to Ken Kesey's 1962 novel prior to publication, but none of the studios wanted to back a movie version. A decade later, son Michael Douglas took over the reins as producer, and the rest is movie history. Jack Nicholson made his rogue/antihero reputation with the role of McMurphy, rallying his fellow psychiatric ward inmates against the authoritarianism of Louise Fletcher's Nurse Ratched (#5 on AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes & Villains). Only the second movie to win all five major Academy Awards® (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Screenplay). Filmed on location in a disused wing of Oregon State Hospital, which still functions as a mental health facility and is now home to an exhibit about the Academy Award®-winning film in a new Museum of Mental Health. DIR Miloš Forman; SCR Lawrence Hauben, Bo Goldman, from the novel by Ken Kesey and the play by Dale Wasserman; PROD Michael Douglas, Saul Zaentz. U.S., 1975, color, 133 min. RATED R

AFI Member passes accepted.

"Architecture of an Asylum"
Co-presented with the National Building Museum

Inspired by the National Building Museum's exhibition "Architecture of an Asylum: St. Elizabeths 1852–2017," AFI Silver presents two landmark films that depict mental health hospitals not as therapeutic sites designed to heal, but as bleak traps meant to symbolize American society at large. Each film is a masterwork of visual and narrative style, but both deploy similar stereotypes about psychiatric hospitals and the mentally ill — institutions are forbidding and cold, patients are violent, pathetic or funny, and staff is either abusive or indifferent. Produced during a period of widespread hospital shutdowns and reorganization, the films' simplistic characterizations did little to confront the stigma of mental health treatment, despite otherwise succeeding as fierce indictments of social control and dysfunction. "Architecture of an Asylum" is on view at the National Building Museum through January 15, 2018. More information at nbm.org.